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Pyrrhic Victory

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Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#111

Post by stickfigure »

pjc50 wrote: post #89
chewz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did mention pushing savers into real estate and other assets. Lots of people are flipping houses simply because thay cannot get decent returns on bank savings anymore. Same goes for professional money managers of all kinds who simply cannot provide decent returns to their customers by buying bonds like old school. So they are forced to chase yields in other risky assets. Also with bank savings everyone has an equal…

Why are people entitled to a positive return on capital, a particular form of unearned income?

People are entitled to allocate their savings as they choose. It naturally gravitates to positive returns.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#112

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

averros wrote: post #16
roenxi wrote: post #3

Two parts of this short and powerful piece really leapt out at me: > all under the auspices of a hard line Republican administration > Washington under any administration will have no choice but to bail out all the state and local agencies and every insolvent pension scheme wholesale There are underlying problems being forced to the surface by COVID that go deeper than political parties. Somewhere between the 1970s a…

Economy is NOT a social construct, fabricated or not. Economic laws are direct consequences of physical laws (i.e. scarcity is the result of Fermi statistics which makes material things to take space and of the no-cloning theorem which means the material things cannot just pop into existence because somebody wished them), or otherwise rather tautological mathematical statements (for example the first welfare theorem…

A whole lot of wild claims in that first paragraph without so much as a mote to back it up; some of it boils down to "because we can't magic things, thus scarcity."

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#113

Post by syncsynchalt »

augustt wrote: post #86

Heads up: this page has 200MB of resources.

Thanks, I've been watching the inspector (currently at 110MB downloaded) for the last few minutes wondering when it might finish so I can read.

I can probably just skip the blank space and read the text but I assumed the images were meaningful since they are taking so much leading space, that might not be the case though.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#114

Post by an_opabinia »

orbifold wrote: post #33

It is interesting how different countries and cultures deal with the same challenge. Streets were pretty empty and shops were closed for maybe a month here in Germany. Now (almost) everything is open again, the streets are full. Unemployment rose somewhat but not catastrophically. The images and videos we get from the US feel apocalyptical in contrast.

Two impressions can both be precise and not comparable.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#115

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

Finance, Insurance, Real-Estate: FIRE. It's called FIRE because if you let them freely trade in a market system, they will eventually end up with everyone beholden to them and the price of everything inaccessible save through them. This will set everything on FIRE. It will erode people's incentives to trade, devalue labor to ensure people are beholden to them, and make your country vulnerable to fascism and foreign military occupation as a result of in-fighting, as oligarchs attempt to divide and conquer a country from within and block the state's ability to collect taxes for defense all to avoid their private losses and the loss of their precious wealth!

ITS ON FIRE!

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#116

Post by davidw »

He has some good writing (he's a regular contributor to Strong Towns), but I feel he's also a 'doom and gloom' guy.

He's correct about cities and their importance, but there's a lot going on with macroeconomics that seems to be 'weaponized' by a lot of people, rather than discussed carefully and critically. I suppose the latter happens in academic journals that don't see much public exposure.

Remember the doom and gloom people who predicted runaway inflation during the last financial crisis?

I'm no expert, so it's difficult to parse out the legitimate worries from people Pushing An Agenda.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#117

Post by csharptwdec19 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #107
clarkevans wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In March of 1971 the house eliminated "teller votes", where representatives' votes on amendments to bills were private; the system then moved to recorded votes, initially with red/green cards, and then in 1973 with electronic votes. After March of 1971, the public could learn exactly which representatives voted for exactly which amendments. In practice, this accountability change meant that lobbyists and their client…

This is a very unpopular opinion, but transparency is not necessarily a good thing.

It looks bad here because in this case the root cause is the quid-pro-quo/pay-to-play lobbying system.

The transparency SHOULD be good in that it should be able to show the electorate whether reps did what they said they would.

In reality it is, as mentioned above, instead used to appease a small but powerful body of the electorate.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#118

Post by syncsynchalt »

close04 wrote: post #5

A bit off topic but why are all the windows boarded? I haven't seen this practice in other parts of the world despite the fact that most stores are/were also closed long term.

Plywood is a lot cheaper (and easy to remove) than hiring a security guard to protect your business from idle vandalism.

Why _wouldn't_ the businesses be boarded if they're unattended for a few months?

(Note that boarding up businesses predated riots by months, in my experience).

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#119

Post by syncsynchalt »

Invictus0 wrote: post #51

I have a lot of problems with this post. * Photos of boarded up storefronts are used to imply that these stores are out of business. They're not, the reason they're boarded up is because of BLM rioters. * Photos are not good evidence of real estate availability. No data is used or sought. * I don't accept the handwavy notion that people leaving the city will automatically tank pension funds. The closure of the Chines…

Businesses (at least in Denver) were boarded up months before the riots. It's about the property being unattended, plywood is quick and easy to put up as well as take down when the employees are back.

I agree that they shouldn't be used to imply the business is permanently closed. The effect in the photos is still pretty striking.

Re: Pyrrhic Victory

#120

Post by commandlinefan »

roenxi wrote: post #3

Two parts of this short and powerful piece really leapt out at me: > all under the auspices of a hard line Republican administration > Washington under any administration will have no choice but to bail out all the state and local agencies and every insolvent pension scheme wholesale There are underlying problems being forced to the surface by COVID that go deeper than political parties. Somewhere between the 1970s a…

> good long term decisions

I'm starting to wonder if good long term decisions aren't things like learning to grow food and stocking up on ammo at this point.

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